The Wood's Edge

by Lori Benton

  Two Hawks’s belly cramped with dread. Surely his father would win it, with Creator’s help. He must. If he didn’t, if one day he killed Reginald Aubrey in his attempt to take William back, surely it would be the end of…whatever it was between him and Anna Catherine. Whatever it might have become.

  If William never returns…none of us need find out. The pain in his belly tightened, cinched by guilt. He wanted to believe Anna Catherine’s feelings for him were as deep as those she held for William, that she wanted him in her life as much as she wanted his brother, but already he feared she was pushing him away.

  “They grow suspicious,” she’d told him days ago. “Mrs. Doyle asked me this morning was I meeting a neighbor lad in the woods, since I still go so often. I said of course I wasn’t. You aren’t our neighbor. Not like she meant.”

  It had felt like a lie to her, what she told the Irishwoman. Her troubled face told him so. And he’d known with a sinking heart that he must cease coming to see her so frequently so she would stop expecting it, stop slipping away so often to look for him.

  Or should he defy his father and make himself known to her father? Force everything into the open now…

  Even as he turned the idea over with a fearful longing, he knew he wouldn’t do it. His parents had endured enough sorrow over his brother to last many lifetimes. He couldn’t add to it by risking their hope of seeing William again, even if not doing so was stealing his hope.

  His parents had quieted. Two Hawks turned on his bench, the weight in his chest like a stone shifting. He would wait before journeying to see Anna Catherine again. Through the winter would be best. Let those who suspected she went to the forest for anything but berries and herbs conclude otherwise. Wait until spring.

  An eternity! He’d never survive it.

  A few moons then. One, at the least…

  Two Hawks breathed out in defeat, knowing he couldn’t wait even that long. His heart gave a thump, as if it leapt for joy at having won out over reason. He smiled in the darkness, anticipation flooding him. At last he let the drumming of the rain lull him toward sleep, knowing he would see Bear’s Heart again soon.

  It was so reckless a thing for Two Hawks to have done, Anna feared her heart was going to beat out of her chest. Seconds after she’d come down from the house to visit Papa’s foal, born in late summer to his favorite riding mare, Two Hawks had crept behind her into the chilly, dawn-shadowed barn. She’d sputtered a few incoherent words before the trill of a whistled tune had him diving under a pile of sacking in the neighboring empty stall. Anna kicked sacks over him and whirled toward the graying rectangle of the barn door as Mr. Doyle stepped within, took up a pitchfork, then spotted her standing, frozen and dry-mouthed, by the brood stall.

  “Anna,” he exclaimed. Then a somber cloak fell across his voice, like Mrs. Doyle’s had worn earlier. “You’re up early this morn.”

  “I came down to see the filly. What—what are you doing?”

  Perhaps he’d taken the strain in her voice as evidence of the tears she’d shed last night. She read sympathy in his searching eyes. “Aimin’ to muck out some stalls before Maura has the porridge warm.”

  Anna lowered her gaze. Saddened as she was by the terrible news that had come yesterday, via William’s letter, her heart still fluttered as though it meant to take flight. Everyone was saddened, including Mr. Doyle, who set about the work of cleaning stalls with a face preoccupied and subdued, forking ripe manure into a cart.

  A nearby rustling jangled Anna’s nerves, but it was only the foal, come to thrust her muzzle between the slats. “Good morning, pretty girl.” Anna’s hand shook as she ran it along the filly’s neck. “So bright-eyed this early morn…”

  There was nothing for it but to count the seconds and keep up a running chatter to cover any noise Two Hawks might inadvertently make, while behind her Mr. Doyle forked stale hay and droppings into the cart. What had come over Two Hawks? Did he have it in mind to finally meet Papa? He couldn’t have chosen a worse time for it, if so.

  She glanced across the aisle. Finished with one stall, Mr. Doyle moved to the next, bending to the work. He was directly across from the pile of sacking now. Anna risked a glance. A patch of blue-striped linen peeked between two sacks. Two Hawks had a new shirt, the cloth still bright from dying.

  She nearly yelped when Mrs. Doyle’s distant voice drifted through the open barn door, calling them to breakfast. Mr. Doyle leaned the pitchfork against the stall. Leaving the cart in the aisle, he started for the door but paused when she didn’t follow. “Aren’t you comin’ then?”

  “I’ve eaten,” she said, hoping the morning shadows hid her blush as she compounded the lie. “I had toast.”

  Mr. Doyle’s craggy face showed his doubt. “That’s hardly fittin’ breakfast.”

  “I know. I…don’t feel much like eating just now.” Truer words couldn’t have been said, though not for the reason Mr. Doyle supposed.

  “All right, Anna.”

  She didn’t breathe until his footsteps scuffed along the track toward the house. “It’s safe,” she hissed.

  The sacking erupted as Two Hawks scrambled to his feet, brushing at himself with frantic motions. “There was a mouse in there with me. It ran up my shirt and out at my neck.”

  “Never mind mice. What are you doing here?”

  “I had to see you again.”

  The longing in his gaze sent surges of joy and fear clashing within her. She grabbed his arm and hauled him toward the barn door. “I’m glad. I’ve something to tell you, but we have to get you out of here while they’re to breakfast.”

  “Will they miss you?”

  Anna peered out. Mist curtained the river, chill and dank. She couldn’t see the house. The track was clear. All they need do was dart across it and be into the tall corn, which stretched nigh to the creek. “We’ll have to hurry.”

  Linking hands, they made a dash for it.

  Through the cornfield and across the creek he followed her without speaking. At the base of the hill where the little waterfall spilled, Anna Catherine halted and faced him. The tip of her nose was pink with the autumn chill, her breath a cloud on the misted air. But what caught at his heart were her eyes. They were red and swollen—like his mother’s eyes so many mornings of his childhood.

  “You have been weeping.” He started to raise his hand to her face but stopped. “Is it to do with William?”

  Tears pooled in her eyes. “How did you know?”

  Guilt stabbed him clean between the ribs, remembering that bad thought he’d had about William, wanting him to stay away. Then Anna Catherine was talking again, saying it wasn’t really about William so much as the woman who took him away. The woman he called mother.

  “She’s dead. A sudden illness. William tried to make it home in time, but she died alone, with none by but a few servants Papa has kept on there.”

  Two Hawks drew in breath, searching Anna Catherine’s face. “I am sorry for it.” The woman had treated her badly. But now…it wasn’t right to speak ill of her. Anna Catherine seemed to read his thoughts.

  “I know she didn’t love me. She didn’t even like me. But she did love William, and he her.”

  “And you love William.” His throat tightened when she nodded, wiping at a tear.

  “By now Mrs. Aubrey is buried and William’s back at Oxford, but I wish I could be with him.”

  Two Hawks swallowed past the ache. He was sorry for his brother’s pain, but his belly twisted with that too-familiar agony. What was going to happen when William returned? Even if Stone Thrower didn’t kill Reginald Aubrey, what would William do when he learned the truth? If he turned against Aubrey, would Anna Catherine lose her brother? If he turned against his Oneida family, would he lose his Bear’s Heart? Would she feel he had lied to her, betrayed her, all this time?

  “Do you have the letter?” he asked her.

  “Papa has it.” Her brows pulled together. “He’s been sitting in his chair like someon
e came along and knocked him on the head. It’s been so many years since he’s even seen Mrs. Aubrey, I honestly don’t know how he’s feeling. He hasn’t wanted to talk about it.”

  Two Hawks didn’t know what to say about Aubrey, so he asked, “What will William do?” thinking perhaps this death would bring other changes, ones his parents would be anxious to know about.

  “Finish out his studies, I suppose. Go home to that empty house in Wales between terms.” Her eyes took on the sheen of tears again, but for the first time since he walked into that barn with his heart banging, desperate to see her, she seemed to fully take in the fact that he was there. “Why ever you came back so soon, I’m glad. I needed you.”

  It was sunlight after rain, her words. They filled him, driving every shadowed thought from his mind. “Come,” he said, basking in their warmth. “I want to show you something.”

  The cave opening was a stone’s easy toss above the waterfall, hidden by the leading edge of the rhododendron thicket that grew up the rocky slope to the hill’s crest. They had to crouch to enter, but once inside it was spacious enough to stand. Anna Catherine’s cap didn’t quite brush the smoke-blackened ceiling, though Two Hawks had to duck his head.

  “How did William and I never find this?” She turned around in the shadowed space thick with the smell of damp stone, her face catching glimmers of light from fissures in the roof. He watched her, enjoying her delight.

  “I found it the summer I was fourteen. It is where I hide when I wait for you to look for me.” He squatted near the blackened remains of fires built over the years, next to the rifle, blanket, and provisions he’d left there before crossing the cornfield.

  She crouched beside him, tucking her petticoat up off the cave floor. Her face caught the light streaming in from the low entrance. “I cannot stay long. I wish I could.”

  “It may be spring before I see you again.” It would soon be time for trapping fur game, and he must help with that. When Anna Catherine started to rise, he grasped her wrist. “Wait. I want to see…”

  “What?” she asked when he hesitated.

  “Your hair.”

  Time stretched while she stared at him. From deep in the little cave, in some recess near the spring’s source, came the sound of water dripping.

  “My hair?”

  “As it was when I first saw you. Remember?”

  Even in the dimness he could tell her face had turned a dusky shade. “I do, but—”

  “Please, Bear’s Heart. Then I will go.”

  She wavered, lip tucked between her pretty teeth, pleasure in the name he’d given her a light in her eyes. Then, wordless, she reached up and removed her cap and set it at her knee. With quick, deft movements she plucked out pin after pin, setting each inside the cap, until the heavy, gold-streaked coil of her braid tumbled to her waist.

  She questioned him with her eyes. He nodded.

  Now her fingers were unraveling the long plait. Now they were shaking out its sections. Now her hair was unbound, rippling in waves, all its honeyed streaks aglow even in the meager light seeping into the cave.

  What man should ever need a fire if he had this woman?

  He’d only meant to look, but as the thought sang through him he leaned close and put his hand to the flame. He ran his fingers gently down the waving length of her hair, all the way to where it pooled on the floor of the cave. He took up a strand across his palm, golden at the end where it curled a little, darkening up its length to her face all but swallowed in its mass.

  She was utterly still, her gaze fixed on his. He felt her breath on his neck as she said softly, “Jonathan…I must go.”

  He longed to kiss her mouth, but boldness failed him. He settled for her brow. A brother’s kiss. “Go now. I will think of you. And pray for you.”

  “For Papa and William too?”

  “Yes.” More than she could know. He trembled with the urge to take her in his arms. “Go now. Quickly.”

  She snatched up her cap and pins and ducked out of the cave, twisting that glorious hair over her shoulder to prevent it snagging in the thicket that guarded the opening. He didn’t follow her out but stayed alone in the cave for a time, fingers tingling with memory, staring at a solitary pin abandoned on the ground.

  The day after Two Hawks showed Anna the cave, Papa came into her room where she sat by the window, penning a reply to William’s letter, and said he needed to speak to her. Every nerve in her twanged with dread at the resolution on his face. Despite no one having said a word about her absence yesterday at breakfast, she and Two Hawks had been seen.

  Anna jammed the quill into its stand to hide the shaking of her hand.

  But that wasn’t what Papa wanted to talk about, and it quickly grew apparent he hadn’t the slightest suspicion that an Indian from Kanowalohale had befriended her years ago, had talked with her, picked berries with her, taught her to shoot arrows, stood between her and a bear, prayed with her to be forgiven her sins, renamed her Bear’s Heart, and yesterday had taken her into a cave and asked her to unpin her hair for him—he’d touched her hair and looked with such longing at her mouth that she thought surely this time he would kiss her.

  So he had—on her forehead. Leaving her thoroughly confused.

  Papa settled on the edge of her bed and told her of a decision he’d made. Now that Heledd, God rest her, was dead, it was his intention to divest himself of the estate in Wales, to cut his ties there. He meant to inform William that if he wished to continue his education, he would do it an ocean nearer to home.

  “We’re at war now, see. Every olive branch the colonies have extended to the Crown has been slapped aside. ’Tis independence for us, my girl, or subjugation, and I would have my family under my roof, together and accounted for.”

  Despite his chilling mention of war, reminding her that even now the newly formed Continental Army had the British redcoats under siege in Boston, Anna flung herself at Papa with a glad cry. “Oh, Papa. At long last, and sooner than I could have hoped!”

  “ ’Tis become a matter of urgency,” Papa said when she released him with a kiss upon his scarred cheek. “Should William not take ship soon, it may be impossible for him to do so. I only hope he’ll not come kicking and screaming.”

  Anna laughed at the notion. “Why should he?”

  Papa looked at her with eyes that flashed so quickly from feeling to feeling she only half grasped his lack of certainty. “This is William’s home,” she said. “We’re his family. I know you’ll wish to write and tell him, but…may I mention it in my letter?”

  Papa said of course she might, then with a smile rooted more in sorrow than happiness, left her to continue her letter with hands that shook again, but with excitement. William was coming home!

  Only one thing might have made the news more perfect. If Papa had decided it a day sooner, she could have told Two Hawks.

  Difficult to credit it may be, but I tell you there are times I forget my great sin, forget that a scholar at Oxford who bears my name wasn’t the son I saw pulled from between the thighs of my wife as the mortars screamed above our heads. Ashamed as I am to own to it, it has been easier with an ocean between us.

  But look you, I ought never to have let him go. I took him. Claimed him. I should have had the making of him, whatever the burden to my soul. But I have been a selfish man, grasping for an illusion of freedom from that burden. Illusion? Just so. For though I forget for a time, always something brings me hard up against my self-wrought chains. A comment in a letter, a reference to an ancestry he presumes his own. Or it is the dream, the one in which I am hunted. Or the shade of that dream visiting me waking—an Indian plying his canoe on the river, a copper face to launch the question like an arrow at my soul: Is he the one, the father of the lad I call my son? Has he come for me at last?

  For nigh on twenty years I have lived this lie. I caused my wife to live it to her death, never knowing. I cause the lad to live it still. Yet in this craven heart there is longing
for him, the only son I shall ever know. Have I a right to a second chance with him, when I had no right to the first?

  If I deny myself all else, can there be atonement?

  I was a man of the People, a hunter, a warrior, and strong. But not always a good man. Sometimes a foolish man, and cruel, when I had the trader’s rum in me. Now I am a man of the People forgiven by Creator. Born-again, the preacher calls it. This thing I tell you is true. But still I feel in me the presence of that first man. That man I was before. I have not forgotten how to hunt.

  He took my firstborn son. That is what that redcoat did. Not a day passes that I do not feel the wound of it. Am I now to turn the cheek and offer that same redcoat the other son, whose heart I see leading him far from us?

  In the heart of my people beats a drum-call for vengeance. And whatever else I am, I am still a man of the People.

  25

  2 January 1776

  Queens College, Oxford

  Dear Anna,

  Received your letter of November last along with another from Father, besides a kind note from Lydia on paper that has made my rooms to smell of Rosemary and reminds me of her old Shop.

  More than I can express in words was my appreciation of your Condolence at the loss of Mama. For all she had her shortcomings, she was my Mother and I honored her as such. You and I will, I trust, never comprehend the horrors she and Father endured at the fall of Fort William Henry, nor the Damage inflicted upon her delicate Mind—not to mention the death of all my poor little brothers—but it is clear from your letter that you have reached a like Conclusion and have, I dare to believe, forgiven her rejection of your Tender Affection, which you would have lavished upon her as a Daughter had she permitted it. There is nothing but Grace in your words of her, no matter how I look between the lines for the old hurt and wistful regret. Moreover, there is a Compassion I do not believe feigned, for when did you ever feign Affection?